Andy Murray emerges from a cloud of dry ice before his game at the World Tour Finals at O2 Photograph: BPI/Corbis

What do Bear Grylls, Sir Ian McKellen, and Sergio Agüero have in common? Convention is that you turn to or click on another page for the answer but I agree with the words of Billy Joel, in his seminal work Just The Way You Are, "I never want to work that hard," so here it is: they were all at the O2 arena for the end-of-year-tennis event, which seemed to attract a subtly different crowd from Wimbledon. I didn't see it all, so Cliff Richard and Terry Wogan may have been there somewhere but if so they were keeping a low profile.

Where Wimbledon fortnight is more or less Marks & Spencer's annual summer retreat, there is something a little more Top Shoppy about the O2. The tennis was mostly terrific, as might have been expected given the dramatis personae, but what was less foreseeable was the organisers' relentless bid to position tennis as the new rock'n'roll.

It is some time since anything tried to be the new rock'n'roll. Knitting, coarse fishing, and space exploration were just three of the resolutely non-rock'n'roll activities to claim the title in the golden days of being the new rock'n'roll, and comedy famously had a sustained bash at it. But since, in just one ad break from the O2, Victoria Wood was plugging room heaters that diffuse the warmth around your creaky arthritic knees, and Lenny Henry was telling us about the lovely comfy beds in Premier Inns, we can assume that's all over.

At the arena, though, the trappings of stadium rock, albeit in a minor key, were being enlisted to make tennis appear hip and groovy – by corporate types, one assumes, who think it is hip and groovy to use terms such as "hip and groovy".

The sound of a throbbing heartbeat filled the stadium, as the players emerged to clouds of dry ice left over from Def Leppard circa 1983, and the stadium announcer doing a slightly toned-down version of the darts guy. The combatants then walked to the court, holding the hand of a young mascot.

It will hardly startle you to learn that Andy Murray appeared precisely as carefree in these circumstances as a man just confronted with the words: "I'm going to have to ask you to get out of your car, sir."

Unlike in the darts, the players do not get to choose their own walk-on music, unless every one of them is particularly sold on Feel The Love by Rudimental, one of a number of untroubling, non-controversial indie rock tracks punctuating the action at the O2.

I am no expert in this kind of music, having lost interest around the time Nick Heyward left Haircut 100 but I think it is what a friend of mine once described as "chartered-surveyor rock", the kind of unimpeachably contemporary CD a young professional might have in the glove box of his Audi next to the soft mints, only giving it airtime when gathering his thoughts on the motorway on the way to a sales conference. Silenced By The Night by Keane, Stereo Hearts by Gym Class Heroes, and Hey, Soul Sister by Train were among the tunes Shazam and I were able to recognise booming out of the speakers at change of ends, when the arena lights dimmed to be replaced by an ethereal blue light suffusing the stadium. How rock'n'roll is that? And for those who yearn for the inscrutability of psychedelic-era music, the tournament boasted a round-robin format no one quite understood, the Captain Beefheart of sports contests.

It was on Sky Sports and the BBC. I marginally preferred Sky because they had Boris Becker, Annabel Croft, and Greg Rusedski but the BBC did a pretty good job, a credit to the glorious George Entwistle era. The news of the director general's departure came in a special bulletin just before Match of the Day, so I suspect he may have missed it this week, possibly catching the Sunday morning repeat. If he did, I hope he took some satisfaction in the fine work of commentator Steve Wilson.

As a terminal nostalgist, I still hold a candle for the commentaries of the Big Match's Brian Moore, the operatic swoop of whose voice transmitted the excitement of a game like no other. Wilson, I think, is his heir, reading a match and picking exactly the moment to ramp up the commentary.

He also turns out to be something of a phrasemaker. When Arsenal let slip a 2-0 lead against Fulham, conceding the penalty from which Fulham made it 3-2, Wilson said: "Phil Dowd points to the spot, and Arsenal, who were in the comfort zone, have played themselves into the twilight zone." I hope it wasn't dubbed on afterwards because, if spontaneous, it was a pretty good line of which his former boss can be proud.

Just a shame about all the other stuff.

Sit Down and Cheer, a History of Sport on TV by Martin Kelner, is published by Wisden Sports Writing, price £18.99